By Eric Niiler
Has our reliance on iPhones and other instant-info devices harmed our memories? Michael Kahana, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor who studies memory, says maybe: “We don’t know what the long-lasting impact of this technology will be on our brains and our ability to recall.” Kahana, 45, who has spent the past 20 years looking at how the brain creates memories, is leading an ambitious four-year Pentagon project to build a prosthetic memory device that can be implanted into human brains to help veterans with traumatic brain injuries. He spoke by telephone with The Post about what we can do to preserve or improve memory.
Practicing the use of your memory is helpful. The other thing which I find helpful is sleep, which I don’t get enough of. As a general principle, skills that one continues to practice are skills that one will maintain in the face of age-related changes in cognition. [As for all those brain games available], I am not aware of any convincing data that mental exercises have a more general effect other than maintaining the skills for those exercises. I think the jury is out on that. If you practice doing crossword puzzles, you will preserve your ability to do crossword puzzles. If you practice any other cognitive skill, you will get better at that as well.
Michael Kahana once could name every student in a class of 100. Now, says the University of Pennsylvania psychology professor who studies memory, “I find it too difficult even with a class of 20.” (From Michael Kahana)

By Carl T. Hall
Even Clayton Kershaw, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitching ace, makes mistakes now and then. And although very few of his mistakes seemed to do Giants hitters much good this season, a team of San Francisco scientists found a way to take full advantage.
A new study by UCSF researchers revealed a tendency of the brain’s motion-control system to run off track in a predictable way when we try to perform the same practiced movement over and over. The scientists found the phenomenon first in macaque monkeys, then documented exactly the same thing in Kershaw’s game video.
Although he struggled in a playoff appearance last week, the left-hander’s pitching performance during the regular season was among the best on record. It included a minuscule 1.77 earned run average, a nearly flawless no-hitter in June, 239 strikeouts and only 31 walks. He led the major leagues with 10.85 strikeouts per nine innings pitched.
In what turned out to be an early warm-up to the playoffs, UCSF scientists Kris Chaisanguanthum, Helen Shen and Philip Sabes delved into the motor-control system of the primate brain. Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, could help design better prosthetic limbs — or make robots that move less like robots and more like Kershaw.
Unlike most machines, our brains seem to never stop trying to adapt to new information, making subtle adjustments each time we repeat a particular movement no matter how practiced. This trial-by-trial form of learning has obvious advantages in a fast-changing world, but also seems prone to drift away from spot-on accuracy as those small adjustments go too far.

by Elijah Wolfson @elijahwolfson
The class was the most difficult of the fall 2013 semester, and J.D. Leadam had missed all but one lecture. His grandfather’s health had worsened, and he left San Jose State, where he was studying for a degree in business, to return home to Los Angeles to help out. Before he knew it, midterm exams had almost arrived.
At this point, Leadam had, for a while, been playing around with transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS, an experimental treatment for all sorts of health issues that, at its most basic, involves running a very weak electric current through the brain.
When he first came across tDCS, Leadam was immediately intrigued but thought, “There’s no way I’m gonna put electrodes on my head. It’s just not going to happen.” After extensive research, though, he changed his mind. He looked into buying a device online, but there wasn’t much available — just one extremely expensive machine and then a bare-bones $40 device that didn’t even have a switch. So he dug around online and figured he could build one himself. He bought all the pieces he needed and put it together. He tried it a few times, but didn’t notice much, so he put it aside.
But now, with the test looming, he picked it back up. The professor had written a book, and Leadam knew all the information he’d be tested on was written in its pages. “But I’m an auditory learner,” he said, “so I knew it wouldn’t work to just read it.” He strapped on the device, turned it on and read the chapters. “Nothing,” he thought. But when he got to the classroom and put pen to paper, he had a revelation.
“I could remember concepts down to the exact paragraphs in the textbook,” Leadam said. “I actually ended up getting an A on the test. I couldn’t believe it.”

By Maria Konnikova
At the turn of the twentieth century, Ivan Pavlov conducted the experiments that turned his last name into an adjective. By playing a sound just before he presented dogs with a snack, he taught them to salivate upon hearing the tone alone, even when no food was offered. That type of learning is now called classical—or Pavlovian—conditioning. Less well known is an experiment that Pavlov was conducting at around the same time: when some unfortunate canines heard the same sound, they were given acid. Just as their luckier counterparts had learned to salivate at the noise, these animals would respond by doing everything in their power to get the imagined acid out of their mouths, each “shaking its head violently, opening its mouth and making movements with its tongue.”
For many years, Pavlov’s classical conditioning findings overshadowed the darker version of the same discovery, but, in the nineteen-eighties, the New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux revived the technique to study the fear reflex in rats. LeDoux first taught the rats to associate a certain tone with an electric shock so that they froze upon hearing the tone alone. In essence, the rat had formed a new memory—that the tone signifies pain. He then blunted that memory by playing the tone repeatedly without following it with a shock. After multiple shock-less tones, the animals ceased to be afraid. Now a new generation of researchers is trying to figure out the next logical step: re-creating the same effects within the brain, without deploying a single tone or shock. Is memory formation now understood well enough that memories can be implanted and then removed absent the environmental stimulus?